by Nancy Thayer
Several times Anne had dropped in to visit Willy to find her so engrossed in her work that Anne had lounged at the doorway to the sewing room for as long as fifteen minutes. Willy played music while working—Vivaldi or Gershwin or Nielsen, depending on the style of her current design—so she couldn’t hear intruders easily. Willy would bend over her frame, intent, poking the needle in, drawing the shining line of thread through, as rapt with her work as a child listening to a fairy tale. At last, bored, Anne would clear her throat, and Willy would turn to her and smile.
“Anne!” she would say. “How nice!” She would rise, her hands filled with rose and turquoise threads, an Amazon with a bouquet of impatiens. “I’m so glad you’ve come; my back is breaking. Let’s have some tea.”
That was Willy’s second secret, her work, which satisfied her so. Sometimes it put Anne off, this pleasure of Willy’s. Anne thought her satisfaction in her work was often a selfish, aloof satisfaction. Willy didn’t care if her things sold or if people wrote her letters raving about them. Her pleasures didn’t come from outside. It was all interior, all in the work itself. Not much of it could be shared. Willy never spoke about it to Anne, and Anne often felt childishly jealous, slighted. Then she would tell Mark that she thought Willy was too passive.
Now Willy was ranging around the attic, carrying on about what a perfect studio it would make for John, how it would finally give him the chance he’d always wanted to explore his talent. Anne wondered. Artists led risky lives. Anne hoped John would succeed, especially for Willy’s sake. She couldn’t imagine what would happen if John didn’t achieve some kind of success with his art. He was such an emotional man.
“Hey! What are you two doing up there? Come on!” It was John calling them from the doorway at the foot of the wooden steps. “If we don’t go for a walk now, it will be too late.”
“All right!” Willy called back. “We’ll be right down.” She switched off the lights and headed for the stairs.
The attic was still bright without the electric lights. It was the day after Thanksgiving, but sunny. The small skylight, which led to the broken and unusable widow’s walk on the roof of the attic, was filled with blue sky.
“This is an interesting room,” Willy said, coming across the attic to go downstairs with Anne. “Don’t you think? It feels interesting.”
“Why don’t you take it for yourself?” Anne suggested. “You’ve got so many rooms in this old house.”
“Oh, no,” Willy said. “This is by far the largest room, and John will need a large area for his canvases.” She gestured to the boxes and crates stacked in one corner. “All those have to be unpacked. I’ll be fine in one of the bedrooms. Listen, do you want me to help you down the stairs?”
The four friends drove out to surfside and walked along the beach, which was dramatic that day, with splendid crashing blue-and-white waves. The women walked behind the men, more slowly because of Anne’s cumbersomeness, and from time to time Mark could hear Anne carrying on about their Lamaze class, her breathing exercises.
John was going on in detail about the changes that would have to be made in the house: the fluorescent lights he wanted in the attic, the work that would eventually have to be done to modernize the kitchen. The balusters that supported the railing along the high, elegant front stairway from the second floor to the first needed repair. They looked firm but were deceptively weak. Sometimes he had been able to knock them out with only a slight unintentional blow. As he climbed the stairs to bed with a book, for example, he had accidentally, lightly, knocked one wooden post with the book, and the post had teetered, then fallen down to the floor. John guessed that the previous owners had knocked a lot loose when they were moving their furniture out, then fixed them back in with glue, a hasty and shoddy job. Every room in the house needed something. It was an old house, built in 1820, and so would always need repairs. But basically it was strong, sturdy, and tight. Some of the workmanship was beautiful. John and Willy were planning to strip the painted woodwork around the ornate fireplace in the front room. Perhaps they’d get to it this winter. And they wanted to rebuild the widow’s walk, which had been left in disrepair so long that it wasn’t safe.
“You never cease to amaze me,” Mark said to John. The men had to yell slightly to be heard over the sound of the waves.
John grinned at his friend. “Why?”
“Well,” Mark said, “all this house stuff. You never used to care what your … abode … looked like.”
This was true. During the eight years of their marriage, John and Willy had lived in a small but chic apartment on Marlborough Street in Boston. Willy kept the small second bedroom, which she had turned into her sewing room, charmingly neat, and she managed to keep returning the rest of the apartment to some kind of order. But John hadn’t cared about any of that, about how the place looked. For him the apartment was only a convenience, a place to toss his clothes and personal necessities while he roamed and thrived out in the real world. John liked being with people. He liked going to the ad agency or the cafés, bars, restaurants, and private clubs where he met his friends and colleagues and clients. And in their college days, when the two men had taken an apartment together their junior and senior years, John’s room had been not only sloppy but downright filthy. So this was quite a change, this sudden concern about the niceties of newel posts.
But then John had always been capable of surprising Mark. The two had known each other from childhood, yet John’s major life choices had been a shock to Mark every time.
Like marrying Willy. Mark couldn’t believe it when John proposed to Willy. Not that Mark didn’t like her; he liked her a lot. But she was so damned big. She made John look like a small man in comparison, and he wasn’t small. He was five feet ten—as was Willy—but slim, with elegant long bones. And he was handsome in a clean-cut, old-fashioned way, with dark brown hair and blue eyes and a mustache that adorned a smile that made you glad you’d lived to see it. In high school and college he always had had his pick of the girls. He still could. But for some reason, he had chosen Willy and had stayed faithful to her.
Once Mark, who was a lawyer, had stopped by the Blackstone Group to drop off some papers John had left in his car the night before when they had gone to work out at a gym together. Mark had been shown into a large workroom where John was bent over a high table, working on a sketch of a refrigerator with an ice maker in the door. The secretary who showed Mark in had been a sensational redhead with a body that Playboy would have loved. She announced Mark’s presence with such loving honeyed tones and looked at John with such melting seductiveness that Mark had nearly gotten an erection.
“I really wouldn’t blame you for that one,” Mark had said to John once the secretary had gone away, shutting the door behind her.
“Huh?” John asked, raising up from the worktable.
“If you had an affair with her,” Mark said. “God, John, even a saint couldn’t resist that.”
“What are you talking about?” John laughed. “Those days are over, you old letch. We’re married men, remember? Besides, she’s only a kid.”
“What is she, six years younger than you?”
“Mentally, I mean,” John said. “Intellectually. Come on, Mark, give me a break. You know I’d never do that to Willy.”
Mark figured maybe it was their careers that caused them to react in such different ways. Mark worked with legal documents, caustic words, angry and frightened people; a good-looking smiling woman always took his breath away. But John, up there in his ad agency, was surrounded by beauty: beautiful models, beautiful animals, even beautiful machines. Mark supposed that John had gotten used to beauty by now; it just didn’t have the same effect on him as it did on other men. He liked it but found it commonplace.
Evidently John found something extraordinary in Willy, because he had married her and stayed faithful to her and remained happy with her for eight years now. Mark had assumed that John was perfectly happy with everything in his life
.
But now this move to Nantucket. It had surprised Mark that John would give up a comfortable, even enviable, position with a top ad agency, making top money, in order to move to the isolated little island to try to be an artist. Oh, well, at first it had shocked Mark when John went to work in the inner circles of the agency; it had seemed to Mark that John should have been a salesman. He was so handsome, talkative, likable, witty. People liked John, and Mark had been surprised when John had taken the job doing artwork behind the scenes. Now he had given that up. And he had done it so quickly, as if afraid that if he didn’t do it in a flash, he wouldn’t do it at all. John had resigned from the agency, bought the house, and moved to Nantucket in three months’ time.
“I want more for my life,” John was saying now. He had moved away from Mark and was yelling to make himself heard. “I want more for my soul. Don’t laugh. When I turned thirty, I started thinking. You know, my life’s been so fucking artificial. All this easy praise and money because I can draw a good likeness of a computer. That’s shit. I need more. I need to … enrich my life. I don’t mean money rich.”
“Money rich isn’t bad,” Mark yelled back through the wind, over the sound of the waves. He and John had trouble on this subject sometimes. When John insisted that money didn’t matter, Mark reminded him that he could say that only because he had plenty of it—Willy’s family money—to fall back on. But John always took that comment as an insult, never managed to see it as a real fact of life: The Hunters had to worry about money, and the Constables didn’t.
Now John waved Mark’s remark aside. “You know what I mean.” He drew closer to Mark, almost bumping into him in his earnestness. “I want—Oh, hell, I want to find out the fucking meaning of my life. Don’t you understand? Don’t you ever want that? Don’t you ever want something special?”
“Well,” Mark said slowly, turning John’s question in his mind, “I suppose so. I suppose that’s why we’re having this baby, you know.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I can see that. The baby. That wouldn’t do it for me right now. But then you’re probably not as raving desperate as I am about this, because you’re into your work.”
“Not any more than you were!” Mark yelled, surprised. “Good God, John, you’d gone to the top.”
“Yeah, but you’re a lawyer. What you do has significance. You help people. You make a difference to their lives.” John stopped in his tracks and shook his head. “No,” he said, “that’s not all I mean. Not just that.”
“Sounds like you in your liberal college days.” Mark smiled, stopping next to his friend. The women were far back now, sitting in the sand, huddled next to each other with the collars turned up on their coats.
“It’s not the other people,” John said. “Or not just that. I mean it’s great that you help those people. But what I’m trying to get at is that you like what you do. You are what you do. You are satisfied by what you do. And I’m not. I can do it, I can make money by it, but it doesn’t satisfy me. Fulfill me, to use a corny term. I look at Willy sometimes …” John turned to gaze back at his wife. “That damned embroidery stuff of hers, well, it doesn’t matter one way or the other in the world, in the course of the world, does it? Yet it makes her so content. And people are so impressed with her work, they just go crazy over it. The things people say to her, write to her—hell, one woman called her a visionary. Willy a visionary.” John went quiet. He began to walk again, and Mark walked along beside him for a while.
“I’m not sure you know just what it is you want,” Mark said after a while.
“I know,” John replied. “I’m not making myself clear. I’m not clear on it myself. I think it is that I want to be an artist. I want fame and praise for what I can do, for the way I interpret the world. And I want that—that fucking happiness Willy has, from doing my art. That sense of tapping the juices of the world. A feeling that I’m special. That’s what I want. I think.”
“I hope you get it,” Mark said. “You’ve invested a lot in this move.”
John didn’t answer. The two men walked on some more, then turned around to walk back to the women. The beach was empty except for the four friends. Gulls soared overhead, calling to one another. The light was fading in the sky in long streaks, as if the color and clouds were being pulled from the picture by an invisible hand. Everything was shimmering with a muted silver light. Mark was struck by the beauty of this bleak November day, and also a little intimidated by it. This Nantucket shoreline, stripped of sunshine and people, the familiar, now was so raw, so vast.
“I want something special,” John said to Mark. “I want to be special.”
“You’re special to a lot of us,” Mark said, cuffing his friend on the shoulder, smiling.
John shook his head in despair at explaining but returned the smile.
By nightfall it was raining, and the wind had come up. The four friends sat in the high-ceilinged dining room and ate Thanksgiving-dinner leftovers by candlelight. They lit a fire in the living room fireplace and played a game of Pente, the women against the men.
“I love these little stones,” Willy said, fingering her deep blue pebble-sized playing pieces. “They’re like jewels.”
“Mmm, I know,” Anne agreed. “This is a beautiful game. And it seems so ancient. I can believe it really is ancient.”
Mark was leaning an elbow on the coffee table, studying the game, pondering his next move.
“What is that warning I get to say?” John asked. “We’ve got one move, partner, or something like that?”
“Something like that,” Willy said.
“Well, I’m saying it,” John said.
The wind howled and threw itself against the windows. Now and then the wind made screaming noises, and the windows shook as if someone were trying to get in.
“Some night,” Mark said, placing a stone on the board.
“The fire’s wonderful,” Anne said.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” John said, smiling. “It cost us enough. We had the movers bring a cord of firewood over on the ferry—there’s no timber on Nantucket Island, no trees tall enough for firewood. So a good log is worth its weight in gold. It cost us a thousand dollars to bring over all our stuff, including the wood. Can you believe that?”
“Well,” Anne said, “all your furniture’s so heavy. All these antiques. They must weigh a ton. But they look wonderful here. They look as if they were meant to be here. Much better than they did in your apartment.”
There was a great puffing noise as the wind hit the chimney just the right way to enter the flue and send a gust of smoke back into the room. For a moment rain splattered the logs.
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I don’t think I could live here all year. I mean, this is only November, and the weather’s so wild.”
“Well, Nantucket’s flat and so far out in the ocean that the wind can really work up some force,” John said. “I’ve heard that it does really blow here. This is nothing.”
“I think it’s romantic,” Willy said smugly.
“I think I’m glad I won’t have your heating bill,” Mark said just as smugly.
“I think we’ve beat you.” Anne laughed, placing her deep-blue stone on a square that gave the women five stones in a row.
“So much for men being superior at logic!” Willy laughed, pleased at winning. She rose. “I’m going to make us all some Irish coffee.”
“Oh, great!” Anne said. “I haven’t had Irish coffee for years. I don’t suppose that much alcohol will hurt the baby, do you, Mark?” She moved over to sit next to her husband on the sofa. “I didn’t have any wine with dinner tonight.”
“My sweet, you drink just enough booze to make our child into a bon vivant and not enough to turn him into a drunk,” Mark said, pulling Anne closer to him and rubbing her stomach.
John put the colored stones back in their bag, rolled up the Pente mat, and put the game away. He rose and dropped another log on the fire. The friends sat tog
ether in silence for a while, relaxing, stretching out, watching the dancing flames. They were familiar enough with one another to be companionable in silence. For a few minutes the whir of the electric mixer as Willy whipped the cream for the Irish coffee joined the other noises of the night. It had a nice controlled mechanical sound about it—a civilized sound—and when she turned it off, the storm outside seemed even more savage by contrast.
“I’m glad I’m not on the ferry,” Mark said, making seasick noises and faces.
“It may not be running tonight,” John told him. “I’ve heard it doesn’t go when it’s really bad.”
Willy entered the room carrying a silver tray with four crystal goblets filled with Irish coffee and four long silver spoons. She was wearing jeans and an old cotton turtleneck and an even older gray-and-heather cable-knit wool sweater she had knit herself years before. She looked enormously comfortable and warming, and with the silver tray in her hands, she was a bearer of gifts. She set the tray on the coffee table, and everyone looked at the Irish coffees, which she had prepared perfectly, so that the white cream rose in swirls, sweet islands on dark, intoxicating seas.
Anne clapped her hands together like a child. “Oh,” she cried, “this is such a luxury! The walk and the waves and the wild beach, and now this fire and this rich dessert. Willy, you’re wonderful.”
Willy smiled. “Well, it’s a luxury for us,” she said. “To have friends in our house. We don’t know anyone here, you know. I mean, we know the Realtor. And there are some people in Boston who come here for the summer, but no one we know stays for the entire year. Imagine, we really don’t know a soul on this island.”
Anne shivered. “I’d hate it. I’d feel desolate. Willy, I couldn’t stand it.”
“Well,” Willy said, picking up her coffee, “it’s only been three weeks. I’m sure we’ll be meeting people as time goes along.”
